Monday, January 1, 2018

Maintaining tiger connectivity and minimizing extinction into the next century: Insights from landscape genetics and spatially-explicit simulations

It is sad that our paper came out on the day a dominant male tiger (BTR T-2) got killed on the National Highway -6. However, it raises relevant questions regarding the future of tigers in human-dominated landscapes.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320717307346

We used landscape genetic simulations to model 86 different scenarios that incorporated impacts of future land-use change on inferred tiger-population connectivity and extinction.

Key findings and conservation implications:
  • Dense human settlements and roads with high traffic are detrimental to tiger movement. 
  • Unplanned expansion of National Highways without mitigation measures significantly increases probability of extinction in many Protected Areas (for dispersal threshold of 500 km and 300 km)
  • Protecting corridors, stepping-stone populations and increasing numbers would be critical for tiger survival into the next decade
  • Our results highlight the immediate need for regional land-use management and planning exercises aimed at managing tiger populations as a network of PAs connected with corridors.
  • Our simulations provide a means to quantitatively evaluate the effects of different land-use change scenarios on connectivity and extinction, linking basic science to land-use change policy and planned infrastructure development.